


Sublimate

by gardnerhill



Series: Oubliette [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Community: watsons_woes, Gen, Great Hiatus, Grief/Mourning, Grieving John, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-24 03:09:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7491057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Watson finds a way to bandage his grief. Part of my <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/134745">Oubliette</a> series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sublimate

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2016 July Watson's Woes Promptfest prompt #14, **Rehabilitation/Recovery:** What comes after the whumping? Focus today on the recovery from an illness or injury.

When I came home from Switzerland it was as if everything was grey and white all around me; London had been washed of all its colour. I was aware of others that moved in and out of the places around me. Mary held me, and I was distantly grateful for her kindness.

I did not disgrace myself nor Mary with any maudlin display at the memorial service Mycroft Holmes organised (the church was grey and white like everything else around me, even to the stained-glass windows). I responded to attendees’ clasped hands and shoulders and sympathetic words to me, in the manner expected. Men lose friends every day, after all, and for most the mourning period hardly interrupts a card game at their club. Yes, it was a deuced shame. Horrid accident, act of God really. Poor fellow, rough luck. Holding up remarkably well, old man.

I remembered how to behave like a living man. I still moved and breathed; I ate, though it was not enough judging from the distressed look from Mary’s face, and I tried to eat more to ease that care if for no other reason, for I might as well have dined on sawdust and ashes for all the savour I took in my meals.

Work was a blessing, a bandage on a gaping wound. I made my rounds of my oft-neglected practise, and people remembered that I was a doctor and not merely a chronicler of a dead man. The ailments were ordinary, the patients were dull and commonplace, and the work had a definite pattern. I walked through grey streets and treated grey people and made my leaden way home. The routine began to settle me into a comfortable numbness.

It was little Tommy McConnell – Mac, he preferred Mac – whom I saw performing some ghastly parody of a hornpipe for the few farthings tossed in his cap that changed that. I threw the lad a half-crown in memory of the shillings he and his fellow street-children had earned as the eyes and ears of Baker Street. Then the doctor in me looked harder at Tom – at Mac – and saw the gaunt look of his unwashed body, the poorly-bandaged hand that showed the signs of festering, his shoes held together with string. When a policeman angrily began to encroach on the boy I stopped the man, remembered his name from my old life, and told him the boy was helping me, and the constable went on his way.

“Dead decent of you to do that, Dr. Watson,” Mac said, still clutching his cap of coins as if prepared to sprint away. “I was sad as anything to hear about Mr. Holmes. So was we all.” And only then did I think about all the urchins my friend had employed in his work, and how their grief had a tangible economic bite to it.

I insisted on walking Mac back to his home, if the hovels in places that make Camden look luxuriant can rightly be called by that evocative word. Other children played and fought in those streets – hungry, limping from poorly-set bones, big-eyed; Jack and Big George and Bobbie and others I had seen in the parlour.

“At least let me clean your hand and put a proper dressing on it.” They were the first words I had uttered in a long time that sounded as if a human being had made them, and not an automaton.

And when I heard Mac’s stomach rumble loudly as I tended his injury (my work attracting a flock of entertainment-starved youths and idlers), I thought of the bakery only a few minutes’ walk from here that would have enough day-old buns to silence a few bellies. Then the foul breath of one man no older than twenty revealed some horrifically rotted teeth that would be only a moment to pull and save him a good deal of pain.

That was how it began.

Geoffrey Lestrade remained a good friend to me, and scolded me for the doctoring I did after my rounds in the vile alleys only a few streets from respectable thoroughfares. “Can’t help ‘em all, Doctor, and you’ll go mad trying to do,” he’d say sternly, both hands resting on his snooker cue as I lined up a shot at my club. His was clearly the voice of experience; Holmes no doubt had deduced exactly what kind of childhood the Inspector had survived, but had never breathed a word.

I thanked Lestrade for his concern, and assured him that I was walking into this with my eyes open – no simple-minded charity worker with starry-eyed dreams of saving the world, merely a weary man with a broom trying to keep a few cobbles as clean as he could, in memory of a man who’d done the same.

This work did indeed exhaust me; but it produced results that I could see every day. This small corner of one little slum began to have children with brighter eyes and louder laughter, who had more siblings that lived past their first birthdays, and more mothers that didn’t die birthing a 10th child amid filth; more haggard working-men who were happy to find that “our doctor” was content to be paid with a cup of tea or a beer for the visit they couldn’t afford from a respectable doctor, and for medicine that would normally mean one family member going hungry that night to pay for it.

My ordinary patients paid their fees and made gossipy talk with me, and my club fellows ribbed me for my foolish ways when I’d been playing detective, and Lestrade shook his head and kept playing snooker with me, and Mary – God and every saint lay their hands upon her – would not let me go out on my rounds without a hamper made up by the cook, to nourish the children we would never have ourselves. And the Irregulars got better.

Perhaps it was some September night, the sun still high as I left the slum, that I stood on the walkway of the high street and merely stared at the bright sunlight reflected off a church spire, as vivid and beautiful as I had remembered from my old life. I looked at all the different colours, and my cheeks and face hurt; it had been so very long since I had smiled.


End file.
